Halloween is one of our family’s favorite times of the year. Over the years we’ve started doing little things to make October a little extra fun for our girls. These are our Halloween traditions for families, that make this season magical for children, and parents alike.
Watch a Halloween movie
Cozy up on the couch with some hot cocoa, and watch a Halloween movie. We like to do this a couple of times throughout October, and the girls love it! Granted, the littleest ones often get distracted throughout and go off to play. Some of our Halloween movie favorites are: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hotel Transylvania, and Casper. You can find a list of family-friendly Halloween movies here.
Decorate for Halloween
Get the whole family involved in making the house spooky. Our girls love carefully placing bats/lanterns/spiders etc around the house, and they love rearranging them until they get packed away at the beginning of November even more, haha. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, we certainly won’t be winning any interior design awards for our decor, but we all have a lovely time.
Boo your friends and/or neighbors
Make up some “boo bags” with some candy, stickers, fruit, or whatever you’d like, and drop them over to your loved ones. The last couple of years I’ve purchased paper bags from Dollar Tree, that the girls have decorated, and filled for their friends. You can find lots more boo bag ideas from a quick Google, and I have some saved on my Pinterest if you wanted to check them out.
Carve or decorate pumpkins
Decorating pumpkins is a super fun Halloween activity for all the family. Younger children can get involved with the sensory side of scooping out the guts, while the older members of the family can get creative with their carving. Last year our nine year old carved her pumpkin completely solo, our 4 year old needed some assistance, and our one year old decorated hers with paint sticks. Paint stick pumpkin decorating is an activity I often do with my kids in the autumn, since it’s festive, and the clean up is easy.
Themed crafts/activities
There are SO many Halloween themed crafts, and learning activities that you can find online. My girls are forever crafting, but they really love having a structured craft or activity set up for them. Ours never come out as the perfect Pinterest-worthy creation, but that’s part of the fun. Depending on the craft you could also use them for tradition 2.
Local Halloween events
The shopping center near us puts on a little Halloween event where kids can decorate a pumpkin, get their face painted, and trick-or-treat the stores. Unfortunately, they didn’t run it last year, and it’ll likely be different this year. But it’s a fun couple of hours out of the house for us all. So be sure to check Facebook for local events near you.
Halloween books
Need your kiddos to take a five minute break from destroying your house? Whip out a Halloween story and curl up on the couch together. I try to reserve our themed stories for the appropriate times of the year, so that they seem new and exciting to the girls. If you don’t have any Halloween stories at home, be sure to check out your local library, or neighborhood “little free library”.
Make some spooky treats
For the last couple of years we’ve made “mummy dogs” using this recipe. To make them extra fun we added candy eyes on top of the mustard eyes. We’ve also made cheese stick brooms, pumpkin tangerines, and ghost marshmellows. My girls are already discussing what we’ll make this year.
I’m always looking for new ideas, what are some of your favorite Halloween traditions?
Check out my Family Fall Traditions, for more fall fun ideas!
Lizzie xo